Troops and Federal Police Out of
Oaxaca! No Police in the Schools!
Drop All Charges Against Teachers and Leaders of Section
22!

No to the
Militarization of Oaxaca
and Education!

Teachers from the militant Section
22 of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers
(CNTE) protest in Oaxaca on July 26 against the militarization
of the state and the educational counterreform serving
capital.
(Photo: Oaxaca Político)

“We would be quite happy to arrest a teacher,
but they would immediately take over the airport and
shut down the state, and if the police decided to
confront them, it would lead to a brawl in which the
police would end up running away or come under a hail of
rocks because we don’t have the force capability
required to confront them.”

The march of Oaxaca teachers on August 14 reverberated with
calls of “Oaxaca no es un cuartel, fuera ejército de él”
(Oaxaca is not a barracks, Army get out!). In reality the
attack on Section 22 has little to do with education and a lot
to do with an attempt to impose by force the unrestricted
domination of the decaying bourgeois regime, that seeks to
eradicate all the labor gains of the past and to annihilate
the independent workers movement. Today they are offering
little in the way of “carrots” – the pitiful crumbs
occasionally handed out by the corporatist one-party regime of
the PRI-government that ruled the country for 70 years – and
lots of “stick.” Governor Gabino Cué himself revealed as much
in his appearance before the Permanent Commission of the
national Congress on the eve of the July 20 coup against the
Oaxaca State Institute of Public Education (IEEPO, see article
“Defeat
the Union-Busting Attack on Mexican Teachers”).

Responding to complaints by senators and deputies that his
government was not imposing sanctions on the “outrages of the
CNTE,” the dissident teachers organization, the Oaxaca
governor referred to “a union membership [in the state] of
80,000 workers, whose ability to mobilize has historically
exceeded the state government’s mechanisms of restraint and
control.” He went on to spell out:

“We would be quite happy to arrest a teacher, but
they would immediately take over the airport and shut down the
state, and if the police decided to confront them, it would
lead to a brawl in which the police would end up running away
or come under a hail of rocks because we don’t have the force
capability required to confront them.”

–La Jornada, 17 July

He summed up: “In order to apply the law we need to have a
state of force which Oaxaca doesn’t have. We have a little
more than 3,088 police and the CNTE has more than 82,000
members” in the state. Conclusion: the real purpose of Cué and
Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto is not to improve the
quality of education but to install a “state of force” by
means of the militarization that is now stalking the state.

The “Days of Dignifying Oaxaca Schools” operation is nothing
but a “civic action” taken straight out of the
counterinsurgency manuals of the Pentagon, aiming to undercut
popular support for the teachers’ insurgency. Naturally, they
chose schools where the population had been whipped up by
reactionary forces against Section 22, like in El Tule and
Etla. However, sometimes the gendarmes (a special paramilitary
force within the National Police) picked the wrong target and
local residents ran them out, as happened in Xoxocatlán. And
in Technical High School No. 50 in Juchitán, the parents
representative made a speech in the Zapotec indigenous
language applauding the teachers and emphasizing that “we
reject violence as well as the gendarmes, our school is not a
barracks.”

Meanwhile, the ominous presence of the paramilitary police
has irritated the population of the state capital: the police
have cordoned off the Zócalo (the main square), infested the
hotels and shopping centers and are carrying out intrusive
patrols in all public places. In particular, the police have
set up permanent posts at both ends of the block where the
offices of Section 22 are located, so that they could seal off
the street in a couple minutes in order to occupy the union
headquarters. The implicit threat is lost on no one. They have
created the feeling of a state of siege, recalling the days
after the Federal Police and Army entered Oaxaca on 25
November 2006. An incident between residents and arrogant (or
drunk) soldiers could occur at any moment.

The phenomenon of militarization is also being felt in the
educational sphere. Not only are workers at the IEEPO now
required to pass through a maze of metal barriers, but there
will also be a permanent police presence inside the
facilities. And as a leaflet that is circulating has
denounced, the new executive-level officials of the Institute
are full of cops. A deputy director who was previously the
deputy state prosecutor in the administration of the hated
governor Ulises Ruiz; the woman in charge of improving
“student convivencia” who previously worked for state
police agencies in Guanajuato and Oaxaca; the new
administrative director who carried out similar functions in
the state attorney general’s office and the state police of
Oaxaca; and a number of others.

At the head of the “new IEEPO” is its director general,
Moisés Robles Cruz, who also headed the “old IEEPO.” (In fact,
as Hernández Navarro noted in La Jornada of 4 August,
9 of the 17 “new” executive-level officials were also cadres
of the Instituto before it was restructured.) The new/old
chief is an attorney specializing in penal law. He has had
positions in the Oaxaca attorney general’s office, in the
national interior ministry (Gobernación) and in the federal
police. In other words, another cop. As for the requisite
teaching experience or pedagogical research for a director
general, he has none.

What Robles Cruz does have is a predilection for José
Vasconcelos. In an op-ed piece published in El Universal (23
August), this lawyer-cop installed to carry out the Gleichschaltung1 of
the Oaxaca State Institute of Public Education, whipping it
into line with the policies and ideology of “neoliberal”
capitalism, considers Vasconcelos to be a “visionary.” But
what was his “vision”? From the second half of the 1930s on,
the country’s first secretary of public education became one
of the ideological promoters of Nazism in Mexico. Vazconcelos
was the founder and editor of the Nazi fascist magazine Timón
(the helm), and during the Second World War he was a
collaborator of the German embassy in Mexico. He effusively
praised Hitler and Mussolini, saying:

“All the peoples of the world have to thank
Mussolini and Hitler for having changed the face of history.
For having freed us from that sinister conspiracy that ever
since the French Revolution had turned over world domination
to empires that set out to reform religion and peddle the
fraud of liberalism in politics.”

Vasconcelos’ racism was proverbial, expressed in his notion
of a “cosmic race.” He made repulsive racist remarks about
blacks, but also vehemently expressed his disdain for the
Indian population. In this book El desastre (The
Disaster), he wrote: “Everything binds us to Europe and
separates us from the aborigine. Therefore, the most effective
mechanism is that adopted by the Argentine people, who have
decided to make Argentina an outpost of Europe. And to
suppress everything of Indian origin.” (In Argentina there was
a veritable genocide against the indigenous peoples.) He
called to build “a European city” combined with “educational
efforts to root European morality in the consciousness of the
Indians,” in order to avoid destruction by “la indiada”
(an indigenous tidal wave).

In educational questions, Vasconcelos was an ardent opponent
of the New School movement inspired by John Dewey, Maria
Montessori and other reformers. He insisted that education
must consist of “externally imposed rules” and “all pedagogy
is coercion.” A perfect “visionary” for the Oaxacan Gauleiter
(Nazi district chief) charged with imposing the free market
“educational reform” of decaying capitalism. A sworn enemy of
teachers and students, for whom education by its very nature
is a collective and collaborative effort.

Welcome to the new era of education under the military/police
boot which seeks inspiration in the spokesman for native
fascism. Our task: to put an end to the Götterdämerung
(twilight of the gods) of capital and its policies of
educational regimentation.

1. A
reference to the regimentation of German society, and
notably university education, under the Nazi fascist
regime after Hitler’s takeover in 1933.